Lots more to come in the next few weeks. You won’t have to wait months to start seeing results from the pivot, although the game might become hilariously tiny for a little while. There’s a new beta branch for this last pre-pivot release so that you can always get this one if you need/want it for some reason during that period.

Exciting news! You may have heard of the upcoming paid expansion for Starward Rogue, AuGMENTED. Well, we’ve decided to push the free content part of that a month earlier, as in… today!

Merry Christmas! 🙂

So, in today’s update, as well as containing a bunch of improvements and fixes we are also introducing two new mechs created in collaboration with community modder Logorouge: Penumbra and Alpha.

One is a glass cannon ninja (or Glassassin if you like) and the other is a roulette mech with completely randomized perks. Both mechs provide a vastly different play experience. Playing as the Penumbra (shown above) can be challenging but very rewarding. With high damage output and a variety of special abilities at its disposal, it’s actually possible to feel like a ninja as you use the evasion unit to dash through dangers, and smoke bombs to hide when things get too hectic.

The Alpha (shown below) is the ultimate RNG mech where you could get a level 15 perk at level 1… or vice versa! Both mechs come with completely new weapons such as the Shuriken Shot and the Alpha Slugger.

Other improvements include an extended tutorial, a new condemned boss, extra particle work on weapons (smoke effects, muzzle flashes, bullet death particles), lots of balance work, improvements to perks (plus one entirely new perk), big performance boosts, and more. This build also contains an important fix for certain achievements that was preventing a 100% clear, many apologies for anyone previously frustrated by that problem.

As for AuGMENTED, we’re pleased to announce the launch date for that is January 24th. You can watch the trailer for that over on the store page. If you want to be informed when the expansion is available, you can add it to your wishlist so that once it launches you will receive a notification.

We’d encourage anyone considering purchasing Starward Rogue to hold off until our next discount period later this month (*cough cough*). Thanks for your support, and Merry Christmas from the whole Starward Rogue team. 🙂

Keith here. Sorry I haven’t been keeping things up to date over here. I’ve mainly been doing release notes on the wiki, the forum, and the other blog, and I was only dimly aware of this one.

So, to summarize the releases in the last 40-ish days, we:

* Completely redid the build and tech menus with fancy icons and sub-icons and keyboard navigation.
* Replaced the text-heavy unit-mouseover-tooltip with a mostly icon-based display, and this glorified “tooltip” has tooltips of its own!
* Spent an unfortunate amount of time handling the platform-bug fallout from updating to a new version of unity (to address a unity developer-side security issue).
* Added an in-game settings menu and moved the settings definitions themselves out to external xml so modders can add their own settings (community member BadgerBadger is already hard at work using that to transform the map-type selection process into something horrifyingly more powerful).
* Made it possible to scale your ui if you want the gui to use a different percentage of your available screen area. Especially useful for large monitors.
* Constructed an “external data” framework that allows modders to attach arbitrary data directly to ships, factions, planets, and the gamestate-as-a-whole, and to correctly persist that data across saving and loading the game.
* Endured absurdity (largely of my own making) for hours and hours convincing the build process to allow us to rename System.XML.dll to System.Xml.dll to un-break the linux build, and finding that the OSX build required a radically different version of UnityEngine.dll.
* Provided some heavy-duty power tools for controlling your fleets, specifically rally commands to automatically forward replacement units to your fleets, active selections to automatically select those reinforcements when they arrive, and moddable formation algorithms to automatically arrange your ships in relation to each other when you give a move order.
* Put in actual models for several existing ship types and finally made squads form up in interesting shapes.

And quite a bit more (updated Badger’s Nanocaust faction, added some new Galaxy Display Modes from the same, fixed a bunch of bugs, etc)